


Circles

by Wrenlet



Category: Supernatural
Genre: AU, Community: picfor1000, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-02-27
Updated: 2006-02-27
Packaged: 2018-10-25 21:16:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10772571
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Wrenlet/pseuds/Wrenlet
Summary: Dean keeps watch.





	Circles

**Author's Note:**

> Written for [](http://slodwick.livejournal.com/profile)[slodwick](http://slodwick.livejournal.com/)'s ["A Picture is Worth 1000 Words" Challenge: The Four Seasons](http://picfor1000.dreamwidth.org/27222.html), assigned pic is below. AU established in [Don't Follow](http://archiveofourown.org/works/10763097) and [Bone](http://archiveofourown.org/works/10771125). (There is incest in the 'verse but not in this fic.) Many thanks to [](http://josselin.livejournal.com/profile)[josselin](http://josselin.livejournal.com/) for beta :)  
> 

The motel was standard, but the graveyard out back gave Dean the creeps and Dad wouldn't say why they were there. Sammy blinked out at the worn monuments, kneeling backwards on the chair with his nose pressed against the glass in the gap between the draperies, fascinated.

"No ghosts?"

Sammy's voice was still high and sweet. Dean sometimes teased him that if he didn't get a haircut, he'd grow up a girl.

"No ghosts, Sammy," Dad answered.

"Then why're we even--?"

"Dean."

Dean bit his lip, sat on the edge of the bed. Every time Dad got that tone, he promised himself he'd stop asking but he couldn't help it. Dad hadn't shut him down like that in years, not even in front of Sammy and he couldn't stop picking at the why of it, like prodding at a sore tooth.

He looked around the room and frowned. Two duffels on the beds, backpack of assorted weaponry on the dresser and it wasn't... they had a routine, and this wasn't it.

"Dad, where's your stuff?"

Dean shifted, straddling the corner of the bed. Their father stood framed in the doorway, his body blocking the late afternoon sun, offering a key and a ring and a worn square of tagboard that once bore a number.

"You've been asking about having your own room, so. I'll be next door."

Sammy twisted in the chair and watched Dean take the key.

"Dinner's at six. You look after your brother, now."

"Yes, sir."

Sammy made a small sound, not a real word so much as an indignant puff of air. Dad ruffled Sammy's bangs on his way out, and the door swung shut behind him.

"I don't need looking after." Sammy's jaw shot forward, sullen. Dean had a bad feeling about Sammy's dawning teen years.

"Yeah, well. Not how I thought it'd go, either."

Sammy crossed the room and flopped on the bed backwards, elbows out and hair in his eyes. "I know... _you_ want a room all for yourself."

Sammy's eyes were sly; Dean felt the flush in his ears more than his face.

"Whatever. C'mon, help me out and we can have the wards set before Dad comes back."

Sammy joined him at the dresser, taking implements as Dean handed them to him. It was familiar and not, two of them instead of three and some things they wouldn't finish until they were inside for the night.

Dean watched Sammy as they worked, compensating for hands and feet suddenly that bit too large like a puppy about to get its growth on. Dad said it was why Sammy was sleeping more, his cheeks rounding out.

On a certain level Dean was always aware of his brother, but somehow having him explicitly in Dean's care made it different. Dean took the bed nearest the door, sat on the outside of the booth at dinner, and Sammy didn't question it or so much as blink.

\--

Dean didn't remember what woke him.

Sammy was quiet as a mouse. Asleep, with that little whuffling breath that told Dean he'd turned his head against the pillow and would wake with his face a roadmap of pillowcase wrinkles.

Maybe the moon. Dean had fiddled with the blinds for fifteen minutes and could not completely shut the gap between them, so he'd given up and let them hang.

Or the moonlight glinting off the circle of salt poured carefully around their beds.

Sammy shifted his legs, mumbled into the pillow. It sounded... Dean wasn't sure. He sat up to check on his brother, and stopped.

There was movement, out in the slice of the world between the drapes. In the graveyard.

Dean's first thought was for Sammy, to wake him, arm him, brace to fight. Only if it was nothing, wouldn't that be perfect? The first motel room they've had to themselves, and Dean spooks at the wind and costs them both a night's sleep.

He had be sure. He slid silently out of his bed and padded to the very inner edge of the salt ring. Close enough, and as far as he dared go without knowing more.

Dean could see plenty -- the blinds kindly framing the scene for him -- it just didn't make sense and Dean thought maybe he was still asleep. Nothing in his waking life fit his father in a graveyard without backup, and even if he faced something benign enough not to need his second and third pairs of hands, he'd be at one of the graves and not in front of the tree at the graveyard's heart.

Dean edged forward again, feeling coarse grains of salt beneath the tips of his toes, listened to his brother murmur in the bed behind him and watched.

\--

Dean comes awake with a startled breath and all-over twitch, and he blinks rapidly to get his bearings back.

He's twenty-six, not fifteen, the motel is marginally less-crappy than his dream and the light leaking around the shades is weak early-morning sun. His neck will bitch at him later for falling asleep in the chair and Sam-- Dean's feet are propped on the bed and Sam's hand is curled loosely over his shin.

Dean hasn't thought about that trip in years. There hasn't been reason.

Dad's journal is open across his stomach, where it fell when he dozed off. He'll look, even knowing he won't find anything from that fall, because it wasn't, nothing happened and the graveyard can't have been important or Dad would have said.

Dad doesn't know everything, of course.

Dean's been keeping watch over his brother for most of his life, even after he left, even when Sam didn't know.

Sam mumbles in his sleep and his thumb makes slow circles on the bone of Dean's ankle. Dean checks his watch; he has half an hour until he wakes Sam for his meds. He settles back into the chair to wait, and this is more home to him than anything's been in a long time.


End file.
